Lament of a Business Traveler

I always arrive early at the airport. I don’t want a 9 car pileup on the Katy freeway ruin a trip that took months just to plan the logistics alone. Upon arrival I learn that my flight to London Heathrow airport had been delayed by 40 minutes. That’s OK, I have a two hour layover before my plane leaves leaves London for Aberdeen and a 10 hour flight can easily make up an hour. We finally get a board and we wait, and wait, and wait. Then the captain comes on and says, “Houston, we have a problem”. We have a hydraulic pump not running and normally with multiple redundancies that would be OK, but one of the backup pumps is not running either. So we wait some more. Later comes on and says “we’re ready to go”. Then we get in the 9 plane traffic jam getting to a suitable runway.

On many flights there is a video screen that tracks the plane progress, altitude, speed, and estimated time of arrival. As woke up from my 3 hours nap that is supposed to represent my Saturday night’s sleep and it's was obvious that we have made up little or no time. I checked the itinerary and deduced that we had 1 hour from touchdown to takeoff on the next flight. Sounds like a lot of time but as aliens entering a foreign country we had to go through the British Passport control and another security check.

Surprisingly at this major international airport the plane stopped and they drove a stairway up to this jumbo jet and off loaded us onto busses.

To rush through customs, immigration and security has its own peril. Last month when I was is Singapore I was in a rush trying to catch up with my group and got hung up because I could not remember the Hotel I was staying in. My secret weapon, smile a lot. We made it to a Aberdeen plane just before they shut the door, sat down and waited for a half an hour on the tarmac.
We did make to the Aberdeen Hilton just in time to find out our rooms were not ready.

So if anyone wants to know what I saw in London, it wasn’t Big Ben or Buckingham Palace. All I saw was the inside of this bus.